D-Day: 70 years later

By Bob Hughes | Special to The News Herald

Published: Thursday, June 5, 2014 at 07:41 PM.

Sgt. Ted Vetland, 506th, PIR, 101st Airborne Division, lay on Utah Beach with a terrible leg wound for three days waiting for the English Channel to clear of German U-Boats so he could be transported to England. He had jumped from a C-47 aircraft, along with 13,000 other paratroopers, beginning at 1 a.m. June 6 into the inky, black darkness of the Normandy countryside, and behind German lines. He told me that he gathered up about five other men and then held off a seven truck German convoy going to Utah to oppose the landings until U.S. planes came in the dawn and shot up the convoy. For his courageous action, he was awarded the Purple Heart and a Bronze Star for Valor.

Leroy Vann was an 18-year-old sailor who drove a Higgins boat into Omaha Beach in the second wave, bringing in young men of the 29th Division. I asked him what he did when the men hit the beach. He said he loaded his boat with the dead and wounded and drove around until he could find a ship that would take them. Then he loaded up his boat with more soldiers and took them in to the hell that was Omaha, and back with more dead and wounded. I asked him how many times he made the round trip.

“I don’t know, Bob; I did it all day, until dark. The boys needed help.” Not exactly what he had planned when he was 17.

Many of the German casements and concrete bunkers remain today, with the bulletholes and damage done by the young Americans with their rifles, hand grenades, bazookas and all of the other implements of war available to them — reminders of the horrendous difficulties the U.S. troops faced on D-Day.

The French who live near the beaches say that when storms come, even now, pieces of equipment which were once part of a U.S. soldier’s kit on D-Day, wash ashore. Reminders of the young men who did not make it ashore and forever sleep in the English Channel.

Unlike the bunkers that remain, and the items which wash up on shore, Col. Mozley, Ted Vetland and Leroy Vann have passed on to join their comrades in arms who lie beneath the white crosses, and who unlike Mozley, Vetland and Vann, were not permitted to experience life after youth. Those three, like many of the WWII veterans, came home, went to work, raised families and built a stronger America.

It was June 2011 and my wife and I were in the American military cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer, in Normandy, France. The cemetery is behind a beach, the name of which is famous — or infamous — in U.S. history — Omaha.

Many hundreds of the young men who lay beneath the endless white crosses had picked their way ashore at bloody Omaha 70 years ago today, D-Day. And others had stormed ashore at a sister beach to the west named Utah, along with their British and Canadian comrades in arms who came ashore at beaches called Sword, Gold and Juno.

It was a day when the Allied powers, arrayed against the Axis powers of Adolf Hitler’s Germany, Hideki Tojo’s Japan and Benito Mussolini’s Italy, held its collective breath. The success or failure of Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of Hitler’s Fortress Europe — spearheaded by the thousands of young men at Omaha and Utah, and the U.S. Rangers at the cliffs of Point du Hoc — could decide the fate of the world order.

We walked among the white crosses, over 9,000 of them. It was difficult to hold back the tears. These young men from all walks of life who had patriotically signed up to help “save the world for democracy,” or who had heard their draft number called, had been trained, armed and equipped as well as any soldiers in history, and were told they were about to embark on a “great crusade.”

Some had seen the confusion, the noise, the blood and the death of combat; those were the ones who came ashore at Omaha wearing the Big Red One on their left shoulder — men of the U.S. First Infantry Division who had fought in North Africa against the Desert Fox, Germany’s Field Marshal Erwin Rommel and his Afrika Korps.

But many of the young men had been held out of combat by the generals who did not want to expose them to the horrors they would face on Omaha — men of the Blue and Gray Division, the U.S. 29th Division. Young men such as those from Bedford, Va., population about 3,000, who served in the 29th’s 116th infantry Regiment. They would pay the price more dearly than most. Nineteen of the 30 Bedford men of Company A of the 116th never came home again. They remain under the white crosses, which continue to stand as ghosts from the beach sands.

We left the cemetery and went to the top of the cliffs overlooking Omaha Beach and stood where the Desert Fox had overseen the emplacement of millions of yards of concrete, creating massive bunkers to protect the thousands of large and small implements of killing — the vicious MG-42 machine guns rattling at 1,200 rounds per minute, up to the 155mm big guns which would attempt to defeat the Allied battlewagons when they came.

The Germans knew the Allies would come, but when and where was the question. The advantages, if there were any, for the men of the Big Red One and the 29th, the men of the U.S. 4th Infantry Division who came ashore at Utah Beach, and the 2nd Rangers at Pointe du hoc, was that the Germans were unaware the invasion was to take place June 6, 1944, and exactly where it would occur. But once the German defenders of the beaches saw the armada of ships and the men being brought ashore in the Higgins boats, they began to rain death on Omaha Beach with the machine guns, the mortars and their artillery.

The young Americans who were alive and unwounded huddled together under the cover of the cliffs until a strong voice rang out, belonging to a U.S. commander wearing the crossed rifles of the infantry — the queen of battle: “There are only two kinds of men on this beach; the ones who are dead and the ones who will die. Get off your butts, grab your rifle and follow me.”

And they did. They finally poured through the narrow draws up to the high ground after the combat engineers blew holes in the concrete and the barbed wire. A foothold was established on Omaha, but at a cost of over 2,000 American dead.

I reached down to scoop up some sand from Utah Beach to put in the Ziploc bag and take back to some veterans and their relatives, the veterans having crossed that beach on D-Day. As I held the sand, I thought about June 6, 1944, and how this sand may have been sticky, mixed with the blood of many of those young men who lay under the white crosses. The men of the 4th U.S. Infantry Division were led ashore on Utah by Brig. Gen. Theodore Roosevelt, the son of Teddy Roosevelt, former president of the U.S. and a military hero of the Spanish-American War.

They landed about 2,000 yards down from their intended landing area, but Gen. Roosevelt, who would receive the Medal of Honor for his actions on Utah that day, declared, “Follow me, men; we’ll start the war from right here.” Utah was less bloody — 197 American deaths.

Being at the scene of the battle that raged 70 years ago reminded me of men who lived and worked in Panama City who were there June 6, 1944. Maj. Hugh Mozley crossed Utah Beach that day on his way to commanding the 326th Airborne Engineer Battalion of the 101st Airborne Division in the battle of Normandy.

Sgt. Ted Vetland, 506th, PIR, 101st Airborne Division, lay on Utah Beach with a terrible leg wound for three days waiting for the English Channel to clear of German U-Boats so he could be transported to England. He had jumped from a C-47 aircraft, along with 13,000 other paratroopers, beginning at 1 a.m. June 6 into the inky, black darkness of the Normandy countryside, and behind German lines. He told me that he gathered up about five other men and then held off a seven truck German convoy going to Utah to oppose the landings until U.S. planes came in the dawn and shot up the convoy. For his courageous action, he was awarded the Purple Heart and a Bronze Star for Valor.

Leroy Vann was an 18-year-old sailor who drove a Higgins boat into Omaha Beach in the second wave, bringing in young men of the 29th Division. I asked him what he did when the men hit the beach. He said he loaded his boat with the dead and wounded and drove around until he could find a ship that would take them. Then he loaded up his boat with more soldiers and took them in to the hell that was Omaha, and back with more dead and wounded. I asked him how many times he made the round trip.

“I don’t know, Bob; I did it all day, until dark. The boys needed help.” Not exactly what he had planned when he was 17.

Many of the German casements and concrete bunkers remain today, with the bulletholes and damage done by the young Americans with their rifles, hand grenades, bazookas and all of the other implements of war available to them — reminders of the horrendous difficulties the U.S. troops faced on D-Day.

The French who live near the beaches say that when storms come, even now, pieces of equipment which were once part of a U.S. soldier’s kit on D-Day, wash ashore. Reminders of the young men who did not make it ashore and forever sleep in the English Channel.

Unlike the bunkers that remain, and the items which wash up on shore, Col. Mozley, Ted Vetland and Leroy Vann have passed on to join their comrades in arms who lie beneath the white crosses, and who unlike Mozley, Vetland and Vann, were not permitted to experience life after youth. Those three, like many of the WWII veterans, came home, went to work, raised families and built a stronger America.

So many are gone now.

How can we, the living, honor those young men who hold up the white crosses and those older men who lived to come home? How can we repay them for their sacrifice, their courage, their determination and will to gain the high ground and give the Allies the comfort that they could cease holding their breath — that the people of the free world could begin to believe that evil would not be victorious?

We can honor them by telling their story, by filling the history books with their deeds of valor, and letting the children of today and tomorrow know that these citizen/soldiers, these schoolboys of 1944, these young men from all walks of life, made the decision that they would do their duty, that they would not let down the man next to him, that they would gain the heights, close with the enemy and destroy him, and do their part which resulted in making the world safe for democracy.

We can repay them with our service — service to our communities, service to our country in the military and in the many other ways our country can be served, and our willingness to be of service to others.

Since walking among the white crosses of Colleville-sur-Mer, I have often thought that every American should make that walk, but of course that cannot be.

But each of us, on this 70th anniversary of one of the most momentous days in American history, can and should take that walk, if only in our minds. We should say a thankful prayer for the young men under the crosses and the old soldiers in the cemeteries across this nation, and soldiers of the greatest generation still living, for the sacrifices they made for us. For it is because of them that we are able still to enjoy the freedoms we have, and do not have to endure the evils which might have descended upon this country if those young men of ’44 had not gained the high ground.

(The National D-Day Memorial is located in Bedford, Virginia. The author is a partner in the Panama City law firm of Barron and Redding. He was a captain in U.S Army Military Intelligence, having served in the Republic of South Vietnam, 1969-1970. His email is vacav4@aol.com.)

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